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Chapter 10
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
The narrator walks through a part of a city called the Prospect, only paying attention to the things that interest him. He thinks of his friend Franziska and hopes to meet her on his walk by accident, since he likes being with her but would never want the pressure of a committed relationship.
The final story fragment of the novel is one of the most abstract—the narrator reveals few details about the setting other than the fact that he lives in a city somewhere. In some ways, this is a return to the style of the first story fragment, which took place in a remote train station.
Themes
The narrator seems to have a godlike control over the world, so he starts making things he doesn’t like disappear. He starts by getting rid of public buildings, government employees, and police stations. When he realizes he’s accidentally gotten rid of firefighters and postal carriers, he abolishes fires and mail too. He continues to get rid of government structures before going on to dismantle economic ones. Then he gets rid of nature itself, until the Prospect is just a deserted plain.
The narrator of this story is like an author, who can also decide, by deleting a sentence, to make whole parts of a story’s world disappear. Like the Reader, this narrator wants to get rid of government oppression, but he finds that it’s not so simple and that when you try to get rid of the unpleasant parts of being human, you might accidentally erase the worthwhile parts as well.
Themes
As the narrator walks, he finally sees Franziska. But as he walks toward her, men in overcoats and hats block his way. The narrator is surprised, because he figured he would have erased all men like them. The men congratulate the narrator, greeting him as one of their own, since they can also erase parts of the world. The narrator wants to go back and un-erase the parts of the world he recently erased, but he finds that he can’t.
Like Anatolin, the supposed author of this fragment, the narrator faces oppressive forces bigger than himself. The ability of the men in overcoats to erase parts of the world in a way that’s permanent has clear parallels with censorship. Like editing, censorship can also remove parts of books—but in a way that the author is powerless to reverse.
Themes
A crack opens in the earth between the narrator and Franziska, and it begins to widen. The men in hats, who seem to be from something called Section D, congratulate the narrator on his work so far. The narrator tries to get away from them and approach Franziska, but now a whole chasm separates the two of them. From across the way, Franziska smiles, greeting the narrator as she always does when they meet randomly. She says she knows a café nearby where music plays and asks if the narrator will invite her to go there.
The gulf in the earth represents several things, like how censorship makes it difficult for an author to communicate with an audience. It also continues the theme of men looking at women from a distance. The narrator’s inability to simply invite Franziska to a café parallels the Reader’s struggle to communicate with Ludmilla about his feelings, even after the two of them have had sex.
Themes
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